Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (3RD-L) speaks during a joint-meeting by Nuclear Emergency Response Headquarters and Nuclear Power Disaster Management Council at the prime minister's official residence in Tokyo (AFP Photo) / AFP

Many issues of national importance to Japan, probably including the state of the Fukushima power plant, may be designated state secrets under a new draft law. Once signed, it could see whistleblowers jailed for up to 10 years.

Japan has relatively lenient penalties for exposing state secrets
compared to many other nations, but that may change with the
introduction of the new law. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's
government has agreed on draft legislation on the issue on Friday
and expects the parliament to vote on it during the current
session, which ends on December 6.

With a comfortable majority in both chambers, the ruling
coalition bloc would see no problems overcoming the opposition.
Critics say the new law would give the executive too much power
to conceal information from the public and compromise the freedom
of the press.

Currently only issues of defense can be designated state secret
in Japan, and non-military leakers face a jail term of up to one
year. Defense officials may be sentenced to five years for
exposing secrets, or 10 years, if the classified information they
leaded came from the US military.

The new law would enact harsher punishment to leakers, but more
importantly, it would allow government branches other than
defense ministry designate information as state secrets. The bill
names four categories of ‘special secrets’, which would be
covered by protection – defense, diplomacy, counter-terrorism and
counter-espionage.

Under the new legislation a ministry may classify information for
a five-year term with a possibility of prolongation to up to 30
years. After that a cabinet ruling would be needed for the secret
to be treated as such, but there is no limit for how long
information may be kept under a lid.

"Basically, this bill raises the possibility that the kind of
information about which the public should be informed is kept
secret eternally," Tadaaki Muto, a lawyer and member of a
task force on the bill at the Japan Federation of Bar
Associations, told Reuters.

"Under the bill, the administrative branch can set the range
of information that is kept secret at its own discretion."

Media watchdogs in Japan fear the bill would allow the government
to cover up serious blunders, like the collusion between
regulators and utilities, which was a significant factor in the
2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. The quake- and tsunami-hit
nuclear power plant went into meltdown and continues to leak
contaminated water as its operator TEPCO failed to contain it.

TEPCO has long been accused of obscuring the crisis and
Fukushima. Many details on its development were first published
in the media before going to governmental or corporate reports.

Critics of the state secrets bill say it would undermine media’s
ability to act as the public’s eye on the actions of the
government and whoever it would choose to shield.

"It seems very clear that the law would have a chilling effect
on journalism in Japan," said Lawrence Repeta, a law
professor at Meiji University.

In a bid to address those concerns the cabinet added a provision
to the draft which gives "utmost considerations" to citizens'
right to know and freedom of the press. The addition came at the
request of the New Komeito party, the coalition partner of Abe's
Liberal Democratic Party. The added provisions also state that
news reporting is legitimate if its purpose is to serve the
public good and the information is not obtained in unlawful or
extremely unjust ways.

The clause is based on the 1970s scandal in Japan, in which a
reporter was charged and found guilty of unlawfully obtaining
secret information about the government. The reporter, Takichi
Nishiyama, revealed a secret US-Japanese pact under which Tokyo
paid some $4 million of the cost of transferring Okinawa Island
from the US back to Japanese rule in 1972.

Nishiyama’s report, which was revealed to have been truthful in
2000, was based on documents he received from a married Foreign
Ministry clerk with whom he had an affair. The scandal ultimately
ruined his career and dealt a serious blow to the newspaper he
worked for.

Japanese law has no clear definition of what kind of new
gathering could be deemed ‘grossly inappropriate’. The bill
introduces a jail sentence of up to five years for non-officials,
including media professionals, using such methods to obtain
information. But it does not clearly state that if a journalist
reporting on a state secret is found to have obtained the
information legitimately, he or she would not be punished. This
has led critics to dismiss the ‘freedom of press’ provisions as
political window dressing.

Despite criticisms, the Japanese cabinet insists that the law be
adopted promptly. It is needed to the planned establishment of a
national security council, which would involve members from
different ministries and agencies. The law would protect
information exchanged through the new body from being leaked, the
government says.

Abe's party has sought unsuccessfully to enact a harsher law on
state secrets in the past. The effort had been given a boost
after a leaking of a video in 2010, which showed a collision
between a Chinese fishing boat and a Japanese patrol vessel near
disputed isles in the East China Sea. The government led by the
now-opposition Democratic Party wanted to keep the video under
wraps, fearing that its publication would harm the already tense
relations with Beijing.

Japan had harsh state secret legislations before and during World
War II, so in the post-war period government secrecy has been
viewed with suspicion, along with militaristic traditions and
other things associated with the Imperial past. Abe’s LDP is
among the political circles in Japan, which seek change to some
of those policies.